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CultivateWed, 13 Dec 2017 22:54:12 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1The Sidewalk to Hell is Paved with Good Intentionshttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/12/13/the-sidewalk-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-sidewalk-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/12/13/the-sidewalk-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions/#commentsWed, 13 Dec 2017 20:25:25 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=18160Sometimes all the right people seem to be at the table, all singing from similar hymnals, and all seemingly focused on transcending growth-as-usual and yet, still, the results fall flat.

Today we look at one of those times.

The scenario

Imagine this:

A site area that retailers describe as a “100% corner.” That is, the convergence of several high-volume arterials with substantial levels of traffic. In this case, roughly 100,000 cars collectively each day. So clearly an area with considerable potential to serve as a successful and meaningful amenity for surrounding neighborhoods.

The area, previously characterized by midcentury strip retail and car dealerships, was the subject of a collaborative vision plan funded by the regional growth agency wherein a broad array of stakeholders spelled out ambitions for town center-styled redevelopment.

The governing municipality has an articulated commitment to sustainability and was amenable to a mixed-use rezoning.

The developer was not new to mixed-use development.

Surrounding neighborhoods were extremely engaged and participatory in creation of the development proposal.

Ripe for possibility, no? Yet somehow, in the presence of so much potential, the result (in part) was this:

Click for larger view.

Let’s dissect, shall we? First, acknowledging the good:

The building adjoins the sidewalk.

A second story allows for small business offices and studio space, while also providing a more substantial street wall.

The parking is located behind the building.

That’s the point where the process moves beyond the fairly basic siting and programming issues and gets down to the level of design. Which is where everything starts to fall apart.

Below I detail how the best of intentions ultimately resulted in something universally experienced as meh.

There was clearly a desire or stipulation that there be pedestrian-focused entrances at the sidewalk. But there’s no provision that those entrances remain unlocked. Instead, they’re adorned with a variety of “please use other entrance” signage. That other entrance, incidentally, is on the back side of the building serving the parking lot. Why not use both entrances? Because format retailers don’t want to deal with that.

There’s an effort (perhaps a requirement) to feature a healthy percentage of window glass yet there’s no stipulations for transparency. As a result, each storefront is obscured with large format advertisements for the businesses inside. Ironically, sufficient and unobscured windows are a requirement of urban retail because the resulting window displays and goings-on inside become infinitely more interesting living advertisements. But again, retailers don’t want to deal with a second entrance.

We’ve spent nine years here on PlaceShakers exploring how communities can avoid exactly these types of issues. And before us, many other practitioners dating back to the 70s and 80s, working diligently to unearth the wisdom of our most-loved places so that new places of comparable quality can be built. And still…

The adage that comes to mind is this: There’s a reason that engineers say the Devil’s in the details while designers say that that’s where you find God. Things either whither or blossom when you get down deep in the weeds.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

In a post last month, I made a pitch for organizing community storytelling around getting stuff done. I acknowledged how hard it is to do that in the current political environment, which is increasingly an arena of competing tribal identities and mutually exclusive convictions:

A community that has struggled to identify and assert shared values and hopes for the future isn’t likely to provide a great context for storytelling, especially when it comes to big, ambitious ideas. Chances are, people with their own stories of disappointment and frustration, buttressed by the experience of past efforts, will have a hard time imagining their roles in a new story or see the ambitions it describes as realistic.

Unless you can migrate the experience of planning and implementing policies from one that under-delivers on promises to one that rewards trust with achievements, you risk getting stuck in a doom loop:

Click for larger view.

It’s a cycle that not only frustrates efforts to connect goals, strategies and outcomes in one project, it undermines faith in the people and in the tools required to get anything done anytime. A coping-with-change story needs to build a case for a “happily ever after” outcome. And that outcome has to be at a scale big enough to reverse the doom loop spin:

Click for larger view.

Yet it has to be small enough to be doable in the context the community provides. Which, in lots of cases, requires a temporary, strategic retreat:

Forget the big, hairy ideas for the time being. Pick the biggest little thing you know you can do. Do it. Celebrate that success. Then, move to the next biggest, doable challenge. Repeat until your story of competence and performance is so duh-level believable that a happily ever after ending seems plausible for the big, hairy idea you want to propose.

Let’s talk about why that’s still hard and how we might enhance the likelihood of success by strengthening the part of the story that moves between agreed-upon goals and sensible strategies.

The Struggle for Common Ground

Think of the story in three acts. The first lays out the context: characters, setting and the seeds of future action. In the second, dilemmas materialize. Which, if we’ve set up the story well, are resolved in act three.

In the kinds of stories we want to tell in community planning, we use act one to round up and analyze previous efforts, to identify key stakeholders, to figure out ways to engage them and to clarify what success will feel like to them. (Remember, the fundamental obligation of storytelling is to know the audience.)

In the second act, we consider the barriers between where we are now and where we want to go, then test potential strategies to overcome them. Out of that idea-sorting, a promising strategy – or more likely, a melding of strategies – has to emerge.

The standard for a promising strategy? Back to the key for reversing the doom loop: It must be practical enough to be within the community’s political and technical capacities to accomplish. And it has to be aspirational enough to make the effort not only worthwhile in and of itself, but also be capable of inspiring confidence for scaling up ambitions for next steps. Act three leverages that confidence to push a project across the finish line.

Too often, we don’t get to that last part with our hopes intact. It’s usually because the first two stages fail to build a stable enough foundation to support a framework for advancing ambitions big enough to justify the effort. In the round-up phase of the first act, for instance, process organizers may fail to fully account for the complexity baked into the context for planning — especially the political context.

To adequately set up second-act idea sorting, we should be close to agreement on answers to questions like these: What can we learn from previous efforts? To assure support for outcomes, who has to be at the table, and how do we get them there? What assumptions are broadly shared in the community, and where are the friction points?

In a community bruised by battles over land use and transportation policies, equity issues and affordability concerns, it can seem that there’s no common ground at all. But here’s the good news: Because we humans are social animals and because evolution has endowed us with software that allows for cooperative behavior, we have the means – if not always the inclination – to achieve agreement. Which means there’s the potential for a starting point for act one goal setting.

Aspirations for (Just About) Everywhere

The starting point for most community planning exercises is embodied, at least theoretically, in a comprehensive plan. And in a post almost five years ago, I argued that, expressed in the broadest terms, planning aspirations are so universal they can be summed up in ten promises:

We will shape future development and redevelopment through strategies that:

Are derived from transparent processes in which all citizens have opportunities to influence outcomes;

Respect traditions that have given the community/region its sense of place and inspired its citizens’ devotion;

Nurture an economy that’s diverse, adaptive and capable of providing opportunities for all;

Enhance accessibility to safe, dignified housing for citizens of all ages, incomes and physical abilities;

Enable the full range of mobility choices, including private automobiles, transit, biking and walking;

Increase energy efficiency and affordability at the parcel, neighborhood, community and regional levels;

Spread the responsibilities and rewards of policy development and enforcement equitably;

Position the community/region to attract and reward future public and private sector investment.

I’m still confident this list covers the principles or goals asserted in most community planning documents. The problem is we can’t stay at this altitude when we design a process for getting from goals to strategies to action.

The Devil (Loop) in the Details

The challenges, again, are conditioned by context. We may share values in the abstract, but the predispositions and suspicions we bring to every discussion, combined with our hard-wired nervousness about change, frustrate efforts to shape a credible story of success.

Take, for instance, the community affordability debates. There’s insistence on one side to use government’s regulatory powers to limit development for rich people and increase it for poorer populations. That’s nostalgia for an imaginary America before corporations conspired against the People. On the other side are those arguing that, unfettered from growth-stunting restrictions, the free market will fill most of the gaps. Just as the Invisible Hand provided for all in the Good ‘Ol Days, regardless of resources, race, gender, ethnicity, etc.

It takes about 20 minutes on Google to find all the examples you need of cities and regions that have tried a bunch of variations on keep-it-simple solutions and failed to make a dent in the problems. Even minor progress on affordability issues requires acknowledging bundles of complexity and the need to combine strategies – and, in more cases than we’re apt to admit, the necessity to suffer inconvenience, if not pain.

That’s from the same post in which I offered the free comp plan. For more examples of the messy debates affordability ambitions inspire, check out Todd Litman’s list in Planetizen.

Crucial to dealing with the obstacles in the way of moving the story to happily ever after is understanding this: We love analyses that imagine the complexity out of problems and skip right to “all you have to do” solutions.

If our roads are congested, all we have to do is add more lanes. If housing prices and rents soar beyond wage growth, all we have to do is bring the hammer down on developers to build what most folks can afford or build nothing at all. If well-heeled investors are gentrifying old neighborhoods, all we have to do is make it harder for them to disrupt places that should be preserved exactly as they are.

So how do we escape from the silos? What would a second-act, idea-sorting process look like if we were determined to embrace complexity and inoculate a process against unintended consequences?

The Walk and Chew Gum Mandate

Let’s use the ten universal comp plan aspirations above as the starting point for goal setting. Then, nodding to the complexity of life in general and to community planning in particular, let’s recognize that goals and the strategies to achieve them are interdependent. We can devote all our resources and energies to one goal and be confident we can deliver on at least that promise — but only by risking under-delivering or undermining on the others. We’ve got to walk and chew gum.

Which means measuring outcomes by the degree to which strategies support or at least have minimal impact on each of the goals we’ve determined to be essential to a success story. Check this out:

Click for larger view.

Under “Goals,” the sentences in the generic comp plan are generalized into verb phrases that shape a question for each of the strategies under consideration: Given everything we know, all the knowledge and experience we can bring to the question, what’s the likelihood that this strategy will deliver on this goal’s promise?

There are three alternative strategy sets. One is “Business as Usual.” No intervention in the status quo. Simply carry on. The other two reflect degrees of ambition. The modest set of strategies may be those for a minimally disruptive neighborhood or corridor redevelopment plan, probably responding to long-standing requests from neighborhood residents and businesses. The most ambitious approach might include the modest redevelopment effort, but in an expanded planning area requiring rezoning, transportation/parking planning and considerable public process.

The exercise requires assigning numerical values to likely outcomes for each strategy under each of the ten aspirations. A zero indicates a likelihood of no impact. A negative value (-1) suggests the strategy is likely to inhibit that goal’s achievement. A positive value (+1) suggests goal enhancement. The total under each strategy implies the cumulative potential for a strategy delivering on the whole package of hopes.

Is assigning numerical grades to likely outcomes subjective?

Of course. There’s going to be debate. The idea is to nudge that debate off the winner-take-all battleground of silo-bound arguments and into territory where information – the experience of other communities, technical data, expert analyses – has a shot at having influence and where trade-offs can be acknowledged and considered. Having to defend a prediction over what’s likely to happen if we do this as opposed to that, is way better than being allowed to veto a process that fails to affirm old, unrealistic priorities.

In the example here, I subjectively assigned values under the three strategies based on experience in community processes. The negative numbers under “Business as Usual” reflect assumptions that we wouldn’t be talking about alternative strategies if the ones in place were delivering on promises.

The moderately ambitious strategy delivers moderately effective outcomes. No negatives. But because it restricts its scope and aspirations, it earns no-impact numbers in a few categories.

The ambitious strategy pays the price for its ambitions by annoying those resistant to change. So even if it tries for an inclusive public process, it doesn’t get credit for the effort. And because it promises change to the way things are, if neighbors in the planning area weigh in, they’re likely to downgrade the “community character” effort. Yet despite those handicaps, the most comprehensive effort grades out higher.

Since I’m more interested in putting a useful tool on the table than in testing specific approaches, I purposely kept the moderate and ambitious strategy sets ambiguous. You’re invited to modify the graphic to match a project you’ve undertaken or are considering.

Refine the goals. Clarify the alternative strategies. Argue over the grades you’d assign. Let me know how it works out and how you’d improve the model.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/29/getting-to-getting-things-done/feed/1Happy Thanksgivinghttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/23/happy-thanksgiving-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=happy-thanksgiving-2
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/23/happy-thanksgiving-2/#commentsThu, 23 Nov 2017 14:56:43 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=18104As much as we’re grateful for our loved ones, we’re equally grateful for good places in which to share their company. Here’s to another year working towards a built environment as rewarding to the human spirit as the people who populate our lives.

See you next week.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/23/happy-thanksgiving-2/feed/0Places that Pay: Benefits of placemaking v2http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/16/places-that-pay-benefits-of-placemaking-v2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=places-that-pay-benefits-of-placemaking-v2
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/16/places-that-pay-benefits-of-placemaking-v2/#commentsThu, 16 Nov 2017 17:34:57 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=18057“Reconciliation is making peace with reality, our ideals, and the gap in between,” via Her Honour, Janice C. Filmon, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba. Much of our work here at PlaceMakers is about redirecting the trajectory of where we are headed with the targets needed to ensure the wellness of our environment, equity, and economy, so that stopgap measures are kept to a minimum. The studies that quantify how the form of our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets effects this wellness is essential to building the political will to make change. Listed below are the 65 key works I’m most likely to quote, to make the case for developing the city and town planning tools we need to make a difference for the resilience of people, planet and profit.

Office space bordering Bryant Park in New York garner 63% higher rents than those one block away, thanks to how the economy values walkable urban parks. Image: CreativeCommons ShareAlike with Attribution to Hazel Borys, 2017. Click for larger view.

ECONOMY

Building Supply: Market Preference

Companies are gravitating to walkable downtown neighborhoods, from the very small to the Fortune 500. These moves include relocations, consolidations, and expansions to places with considerably higher Walk Scores, Transit Scores, and Bike Scores from where the businesses were previously located. Companies are making their move downtown to attract and retain talented workers, to build brand identity and company culture, to support creative collaboration, to be closer to customers and business partners, to centralize operations, and to support the triple bottom line. (Smart Growth America; Cushman & Wakefield; George Washington University School of Business Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, 2015)

66% of Americans believe that investing in schools, transportation choice, walkability, and key community features is the best way to strengthen the economy. Less than 10% of the massive Millennial and Boomer Generations want traditional, auto-dependent suburban living, even though over 40% live there today. “Economics of place” is likely to drive economic growth and development, with traditional business recruitment strategies seen as less important than investing in local amenities and quality of life. (American Planning Association, 2014)

Americans prefer walkable communities more so than they have in the past. 79% place importance on being within easy walking distance of neighborhood destinations. (National Association of Realtors, 2015)

National retailers pay attention to Walk Score, often requiring a score of 80 or higher to consider adding a new store downtown. However, in the 51 largest U.S. metro areas, only 12% of neighborhoods are walkable, which is down from 19% in 1970. The 50/50/50 rule says that Main Street retail’s ideal sweet spot enjoys at least 50,000 people earning at least $50,000 per year, or 50,000 cars going by a store. (Gibbs, Bob, 2011)

Trying to build a downtown out of just specialty shops does not work because form follows anchor. Only about 30,000 square feet of retail is supportable without an anchor. An anchor may be a baby box retailer as well as non-retail amenities. A library, post office, and courthouse are all strong civic anchors. In most places, the anchor pays half the rent of in-line stores, in exchange for their big advertisements and draw. (Gibbs, Bob, 2011)

The rising Millennial generation coupled with the retiring Baby Boomers make up half of the U.S. population, and are driving the demand for a walkable urban alternative in downtowns. Across North America, downtown residents are frequently younger and better educated, and being close to work and public transit are their top two reasons for living downtown. (Smart Prosperity Institute, 2013)

This trend toward more new jobs in city centers, with employment growth shrinking in the suburbs, has built up momentum in the last several years. Businesses are choosing to locate in walkable locations, to attract younger workers who prefer a less car-dependent, more urban lifestyle. (Cortright, Joe; City Observatory, 2015)

Property values within walking distance of public transit stations are 40% higher than other properties in the same region. (American Public Transportation Association, 2013)

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” ~Jane Jacobs

Building City Coffers: Increased Tax Base and Decreased Costs

Smart growth development in the U.S. generates 10x more tax revenue per acre than conventional suburban development and costs less by an average of 10% on ongoing delivery of police, ambulance and fire services; Income per acre is as high as 1,150 times more under Nashville’s downtown form-based code, compared to suburban counterparts. (Smart Growth America, 2013)

While suburbs are growing 160% faster than cities in Canada, suburban dwellers pay only half the cost of roads that city dwellers pay. (Smart Prosperity Institute, 2013)

Urban mixed-use mid-rise is 25 to 59 times more revenue per acre than its suburban counterparts. (Minicozzi, Joe; Urban3, 2010)

Calgary estimated compact development will save the City $11 billion in infrastructure costs, making it 33% less costly to build the roads, transit, water, recreation, fire, and schools that it expects to need over the next 60 years. (City of Calgary, 2009)

Halifax’s annual cost per household is more than two times more per suburban households than for urban. (Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, 2005)

An EPA-sponsored study indicates compact infrastructure is up to 47% less expensive than conventional development patterns. (Ford, Jonathan; Morris Beacon, 2010)

Nashville is the first city with over $1 billion of new construction under form-based codes; for that new development, the property values grew at 3.5 time that of the region from 2005 to 2013. (Bernhardt, Richard, 2013)

Building Commercial and Home Values

If your Walk Score increases from 60 to 80, that increased walkability translates into a $100,000 home price premium. (Redfin, 2016)

A one-point increase in Walk Score (based on number of destinations within a short distance) is associated with between a $700 and $3,000 increase in home values. (Cortright, Joe; Impresa, Inc.; CEOs for Cities, 2009)

Over time in D.C. metropolitan neighborhoods, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, over $300 per month to apartment rents, and nearly $82 per square foot to home values. (Leinberger, Chris; Alfonzo, Mariela; Brookings, 2012)

Homes in walkable urban neighborhoods have experienced less than half the average decline in price from the housing peak in the mid-2000s. (Brookings, 2010)

The best way to plan for downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them.” ~Jane Jacobs

Building Wealth: Cycling and Walking

One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society in Copenhagen, while one mile driving is a $.20 loss. (City of Copenhagen, 2012)

Biking saves U.S. riders billions a year. Average annual operating cost of a bicycle: $308. Average annual operating cost of a car: $8,220. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of bicycle commuters grew 40% in the US. The average American household spends more on transportation (16%) than on food or healthcare. Low-income families may spend up to 55% of income on transportation when they live in auto-centric environments. (Forbes, 2012)

Eliminating one car from a typical household budget can allow that family to afford a $100,000 larger mortgage. (Doherty, Patrick; Leinberger; Christopher; Brookings, 2010)

$10 saved for each 10 mile commute. (Mr. Money Mustache, 2011)

Building Wealth: Nature

Proximity to green space is a significant monetary value for both retail and residential uses, with increases of up to one-fifth the value of the property. (Nicholls, S.; Crompton, J. L.; National Recreation and Parks Association; Journal of Leisure Research, 2005)

Street trees contribute to wellness, and have about $90k of direct benefit for each tree, over its lifespan, making the return on investment of a tree about 150x. (Dan Burden, 2006)

Costs of Illnesses: Obesity and Overweight

Almost 30% of people globally are obese, expected to top 50% by 2050. The healthcare cost to treat obesity globally is expected to top $1.2 trillion annually by 2050, 46% of which will fall on the U.S. In 2014, the U.S. spent $324 billion to treat illnesses related to being overweight. (Hay, Simon et al; The Lancet, Volume 390, Issue 10100, 1260 – 1344, 2017)

New Yorkers emit a little over a third of the carbon emissions as the average American, thanks to transit-served compact, walkable urbanism. Image: The High Line, CreativeCommons ShareAlike with Attribution to Hazel Borys, 2017. Click for larger view.

ENVIRONMENT

Decreasing Emissions: Land Development Patterns

One pound CO2 saved for every mile pedaled on a bike-share bike. (Shaheen, Susan, 2014)

Land development patterns and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have a significant impact on petroleum use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Doubling residential density while increasing nearby employment, transit, and mixed use can decrease VMT by 25%, along with reductions in energy consumption and GHGs. (The Transportation Research Board; National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2010)

New Yorkers emit far less carbon (5.8 metric tons of CO2 per capita in 2014) than those of residents of comparable U.S. cities and about a third as much carbon as the activities of the average American (16.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita in 2014). (New York City, 2016)

Walkable communities can quell the effects of global warming and peaking oil with mixed use, compact urban design. An average family in auto-dependent community drives 24,000 miles per year, while a family in a walkable community of 16 dwelling units per acre and compact mixed use drives 9,000 miles per year. (Doug Farr, 2007)

Households in drivable suburban neighborhoods spend on average 24% of their income on transportation; those in walkable neighborhoods spend about 12%. The difference amounts to $700 billion a year in total, according to Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. (Bernstein, Scott; Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2015)

41 million acres of rural land the US lost to development from 1982 to 2007. That’s almost the size of the State of Washington. We are developing real lands at a rate of 40 acres per hour. (American Farmland Trust, 2017)

New York is the most walkable city in the U.S., and according to the study, Foot Traffic Ahead, it is also the most socially equitable city in the U.S. Image: New York Public Library CreativeCommons ShareAlike with Attribution to Hazel Borys, 2017. Click for larger view.

EQUITY

Building Connections: Social Capital

People living in walkable neighborhoods trust neighbors more, participate in community projects and volunteer more than in non-walkable areas. (Rogers, Shannon; Halstead, John; Gardner, Kevin; Carlson, Cynthia; University of New Hampshire, 2010)

Social equity is a generator of social capital. Which in turn builds more equity. Every ten minutes of commuting reduces all forms of social capital by 10%. (Putnam, Robert, 2000)

Building Health: Cycling and Walking

Communities that invest in bicycling and walking have higher property values, create new jobs, and attract tourists. More jobs are created per dollar spent on pedestrian and cycling amenities than on car-only investments. States with higher rates of bicycling and walking to work also have a higher percentage of the population meeting recommended levels of physical activity, and have lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Cycling and walking investments return up to $11.80 for every $1 invested. (The Alliance for Biking & Walking, 2016)

Among the more than 72,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study, those who walked 3 or more hours/week reduced their risk of a coronary event by 35% compared with women who did not walk. Risks of death from breast and uterine cancer were reduced 19% in those who walked 1 to 3 hours per week, by 54% for walking 3 to 5 hours per week. (Harvard University, 2012)

Commuters are more satisfied with cycling than driving or taking transit, even in Canadian winter. (Willis, D., Manaugh; K., El-Geneidy, A., 2013)

While the number of overweight kids is starting to plateau in developed countries, the number worldwide have increased by a factor of 10 in the last 40 years. 124 million boys and girls are obese. (Abarca-Gomez, Leandra et al; World Health Organization; The Imperial College in London, 2017)

Regular cycling is correlated to a 50% less heart disease, observing people who cycle 20 miles a week compared to those who do not exercise at all. (Purdue University, 2017)

People who cycle to work were 40% less likely to die during the follow-up period. (Andersen, L et al; Archives of Internal Medicine, 160, 1621-28, 2000)

U.S. life expectancy is in decline for the first time since 1993. 3 of top 4 culprits: heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s, and all of which, as the other studies listed here show, are impacted by the forms of our built environment, and how well we integrate nature into cities. (Xu, Jiaquan; Murphy, Sherry; Kochanek, Kenneth; Arias, Elizabeth; U.S. National Center for Health Statistics; NCHS Data Brief No. 267, 2016)

More than 50% of people now live in urban areas. By 2050 this proportion will be 70%. Participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world. (Bratmana, Gregory; Hamiltonb, Paul; Hahnc, Kevin; Daily, Gretchen; Grossc, James, 2015)

Epigenetics intones that even though you’re dealt your hand of DNA, your behavior has the ability to turn the sound up or down on your genetic predispositions. This study goes as far as to say your zip code is a more accurate health forecast than your genetic code. (Project for Public Spaces, 2016)

You don’t have to be touching nature to be healed by it. Just looking out a window at a garden is proven to increase your recovery rate. This psychological and physical boost is a micro-restorative experience. This early study by Roger Ulrich set in motion a vast inquiry. (Ulrich, Roger; Science, 1984)

Building Health: Urban Form

Social determinants of health include quality education, stable employment, safe homes and neighborhoods, and access to preventive services. Poor health outcomes are often made worse by the interaction between individuals and their social and physical environment. The targets for weight loss set in this framework of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are not currently being met by the population. (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2017)

U.S. metros with the highest levels of walkable urbanism are also the most educated and wealthy (as measured by GDP per capita) and, surprisingly, the most socially equitable. There are substantial and growing rental rate premiums for walkable urban office (90 percent), retail (71 percent), and rental multi-family (66 percent) over drivable sub-urban products. Combined, these three product types have a 74 percent rental premium over drivable sub-urban. The national concern about social equity has been exacerbated by the very rent premiums highlighted above, referred to as gentrification. Counter-intuitively, measurement of moderate-income household (80 percent of AMI) spending on housing and transportation, as well as access to employment, shows that the most walkable urban metros are also the most socially equitable. The reason for this is that low cost transportation costs and better access to employment offset the higher costs of housing. This finding underscores for the need for continued, and aggressive, development of attainable housing solutions. (Smart Growth America, 2016)

In under a decade, over 112,000 people were killed in speeding-related crashes in the U.S. For all causes of traffic fatalities, in 2016 alone over 37,000 people died in car crashes in the U.S. This is despite the effectiveness of engineering countermeasures for speeding is well established, including roundabouts and road diets. Information about them is available in several sources, including the AASHTO Highway Safety Manual (AASHTO 2010) and the FHWA’s online Crash Modification Factors Clearinghouse. Engineering countermeasures for speeding are also promoted in the National Association of City Transportation Planners’ Urban Street Design Guide (NACTO 2017) and are increasingly being adopted by state and local transportation departments. (National Transportation Safety Board; NTSB/SS-17/01 PB2017-102341, 2017)

Physical activity has many benefits, including reducing the risk of developing chronic diseases and supporting healthy aging. Walking is the most common form of physical activity across the country and an excellent way to help people become more active. In September 2015, the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Department of Health and Human Services released Step It Up! The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Walking and Walkable Communities to increase walking among people across the United States. Despite these benefits and the call to action, 49.9% of all US adults and 27.1% of high school students meet the recommendation for aerobic physical activity. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; US Dept of Health and Human Services, 2017)

Across Utah, a less than active person annually spends $3 less on healthcare for every additional mile walked and $0.75 for every additional mile biked. (Utah Transit Authority; Urban Design 4 Health, Inc.; Fehr and Peers; HDR Engineers, 2017)

Building Supply: Market Preference

Fewer young people want cars. In 1995, people age 21 to 30 drove 21% of all miles driven in the U.S.; in 2009 it was 14%, despite consistent growth of the age group. Living car-free in walkable areas fits younger lifestyles, as does owning less stuff, enabled by the sharing economy. (Advertising Age, 2010)

The number of people of all ages who have driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014 in the U.S. The group from 16 to 44 years old has been on the wane since 1983. The number is especially big for teens: in 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had licenses, but in 2014 only 24% did. (Sivak, Michael; Schoettle, Brandon; Transportation Research Institute; The University of Michigan, 2016)

Gen Z (or iGen) in the U.S. are less likely to want to drive. (Twenge, JM; Park, H; San Diego State University and Bryn Mawr College; Child Development, 2017)

Ostergaard, AG et al; Journal of Physical Activity and Health, Volume 9. (2012) Cycle to school is associated with lower BMI and lower odds of being overweight or obese in a large population-based study of Danish adolescents. Retrieved 2017 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22733866

Rogers, Shannon; Halstead, John; Gardner, Kevin; Carlson, Cynthia; University of New Hampshire. (2010) Examining Walkability and Social Capital as Indicators of Quality of Life at the Municipal and Neighborhood Scales. Retrieved 2017 from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11482-010-9132-4

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/16/places-that-pay-benefits-of-placemaking-v2/feed/0Watch Your Words: Building support for walking and biking infrastructurehttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/08/building-support-for-walking-and-biking-infrastructure/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=building-support-for-walking-and-biking-infrastructure
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/08/building-support-for-walking-and-biking-infrastructure/#commentsWed, 08 Nov 2017 19:05:50 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=18035In my last post, I looked at the difficulty of getting things — like walking and biking infrastructure — done and how the manner in which we measure our accomplishments makes all the difference. Not just towards building momentum but towards building community.

In short, it’s all about baby steps.

But let’s say you’ve now taken some of those baby steps. Using my previous example, let’s say you got a bike lane installed. My guess is that, among your most ardent champions and supporters, no one’s looking to stop there. You’re looking for more. More routes, more options.

That’s where things start to get tricky.

Chances are, your initial foray into bicycling infrastructure picked the low-hanging fruit — the street with the fewest hurdles, both physical and political. But your next effort might be more difficult. Perhaps it’ll be a street that’s not grossly over-engineered, requiring something more than just re-striping.

Perhaps it’ll require more substantive public conversations about space allocation, nudging local perception across the line from cute community amenity to vehicular inconvenience.

How you tread next is very important because all too often, communities stumble by setting unrealistic near-term expectations.

People working towards more livable communities tend to be long-term thinkers who know whatever’s getting done today is just one step towards larger goals. But that’s not necessarily the norm for all the people just living their day-to-day lives. It’s critical that what you’re doing today be presented in ways that resonate with them, where they are in the here and now.

For example

Many places have significant long-term mobility goals. They recognize the potential benefits of alternative modes of travel and know that, when those options truly exist, the promise of congestion reduction becomes viable. That is, every person walking or rolling can be a car off the street.

But it’s a mistake to talk about that now.

A handful of bike lanes or sidewalks, while nice, is insufficient to offer viable alternative modes of travel for most people. It’s not until you develop meaningful networks wherein the infrastructure is extensive and fully connected — both within your community and beyond — that significant numbers of people begin examining their options.

You’ll get there, yes. Just not anytime soon. So don’t make that your pitch.

When you say “every bike is a car off the road” early in the process, you invite measurement. How many people are using your bike lane? Assuming you’ve no real network in place just yet, that number’s likely a small one. And will be for a while. Which to the people expecting congestion relief looks like failure.

Boondoggle, they cry! And you’ve given them the reason to feel that way. Good luck getting support or funding for your next phase.

This one bike lane’s not solving congestion. It’s not even impacting it in any appreciable way. It’s important you don’t suggest that it is.

Focus on what you can deliver

Instead, set expectations you know you can meet or exceed with each step. Every community’s different, and you know your community best, but your answer might more realistically involve selling your efforts on the basis of things like:

Safety, particularly as it relates to kids

Recreation and lifestyle

Increased fairness and equity

These are things your efforts — today, right now — can deliver on. In ways that look like a win, which gives you not just the credibility to keep going but some increased political capital to spend when you get to the inevitably more difficult segments of your plan, like streets where new infrastructure significantly impacts current and accepted patterns of use.

Paving the way towards larger goals

As you build local support over time by delivering on the promises you’ve made and meeting the expectations you’ve set, you’ll have plenty of time to get people thinking about the bigger picture and the larger potential benefits slowly coming into view.

To that end, I recommend something that, given their ubiquity in livability discussions, might seem a radical tweak in your terminology:

Back away from the terms walkability and bike-ability and instead get people thinking in terms of walk-propensity and bike-propensity. That is, how likely is it that what we’re doing is going to get more people walking and rolling?

Talking about walking and biking propensity establishes a baseline understanding among your constituents that each new sidewalk or bike lane improves overall performance, and that the design of those facilities is equally pertinent. The better the network, the higher the propensity. And then, finally, the promise of walking and biking as true alternative modes of transportation — and with it, as potential solutions in addressing automotive congestion — becomes a viable proposition. One you can tout and realistically deliver on.

This revised framing further opens the door to other conversations as well. Conversations not everyone recognizes as related — like land use, development form, street geometry, and the nature of public space — but that definitely play a role in how people want or choose to get around. That’s a critical factor when you start talking not just about transportation but about larger livability issues.

Infrastructure obviously needs a physical implementation strategy, but it should also include an engagement strategy that meets people where they are and helps move them, slowly and methodically, towards shared benefit. Careful communications can help.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/11/08/building-support-for-walking-and-biking-infrastructure/feed/0Corrosion of Community: Impossible standards as an excuse for inactionhttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/25/impossible-standards-as-an-excuse-for-inaction/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=impossible-standards-as-an-excuse-for-inaction
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/25/impossible-standards-as-an-excuse-for-inaction/#commentsWed, 25 Oct 2017 15:15:39 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=17956In a coming post I’ll be addressing the long crawl towards walkability, and towards communities where the promise of meaningful transportation choice becomes increasingly realized. Long story short, the process, already difficult, can become harder rather than easier over time for reasons I’ll explain. But first, let’s revisit the struggles of just getting started with this post from several years back. Because before you can work your way into the deep end, you gotta get in the pool.

Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.

I wrote about a series of these here. Not ways to create community, mind you, but ways to foster it. Ways that cities and towns can aid our instinctive urge to connect and co-exist in productive relationship.

It’s not about kumbaya or chamber of commerce photo ops. It’s about survival. I, together with a growing body of research, view the relative strength or weakness of community ties as an indicator, perhaps the most critical indicator, of resilience. Not unlike John Michael Greer who, in his handy post-industrial how-to, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, asserts “the community, not the individual, is the basic unit of human survival. History shows that local communities can flourish while empires fall around them.”

Not a small deal. In short, our ability to keep on keepin’ on may, at its most fundamental levels, come down to how well we’re connected.

Corrosive forces

How to help build community up is one thing, but what about factors that tend to tear it down? What about the things that stand in the way of meaningful progress? Things that draw and lock us into perpetual and unproductive stasis?

Those are equally interesting. So today I identify the first of what will probably be more to come: Measuring success against impossible ideals rather than achievable goals.

This instinct is seemingly epidemic and unrelated to affluence. It plays out like this: Say your city, town, neighborhood or other collection of folks working together, accomplishes something. For example, let’s say it manages to get bike lanes installed on a primary route through town.

From my vantage point, which includes study of near-countless communities doing similar things, I’d see it as a huge win. I’d see something people should take great pride in and use to propel their momentum forward. After all, consider the likely dynamics involved: an all-powerful state DOT; the ability to secure funding; the personal agendas of city leaders; the challenges of allocating limited public space; adjacent residents confronted with the possibility of change; and the ever-present belief by most people that more car lanes equals less traffic.

Despite all that, each a formidable obstacle in and of itself, it got done. Yet, what do the corrosive forces have to say about it? Why, it’s a failure for any number of reasons. It’s just one route, rather than a network of bike lanes. They ended up striped rather than protected. They displaced driving space or include segments with sharrows.

Whatever the reason, the underlying position remains the same: Even for those ideologically in favor of the effort, the project is a failure because it falls some degree short of perfect. As though perfect were ever a possible outcome.

This is ludicrous. People making the conscious decision to work together, to put their differences aside in pursuit of shared interests, to find initiatives with the potential to improve quality of life (and, with it, economic, social and/or environmental performance), and to navigate obstacles to actually get something done, constitutes success. Grand success. Why? Because it so greatly exceeds what can be reasonably expected in the course of the day-in, day-out operations of most places.

I’ve seen plenty of places where, for a host of reasons, nothing ever gets better. Day to day operations are managed, people go about their business, yet no investments in the future viability of the community ever seem to materialize.

This is what one should reasonably expect to happen in Anytown, USA. Thus, this is the bar against which proactive efforts should be measured.

If your city or town is getting things done, consider yourself lucky. It’s a lot more rare than you think. And if you possess some particular insight into how such initiatives could be even better, leave the comfort of your armchair and get in the game.

It’s actually quite simple: If the efforts around you are lacking and you know how to improve them but fail to contribute, the problem isn’t those working to make things happen.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/25/impossible-standards-as-an-excuse-for-inaction/feed/1Plotting a Persuasive Story? Better have a happily ever afterhttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/17/plotting-a-persuasive-story-better-have-a-happily-ever-after/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=plotting-a-persuasive-story-better-have-a-happily-ever-after
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/17/plotting-a-persuasive-story-better-have-a-happily-ever-after/#commentsTue, 17 Oct 2017 15:44:03 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=17930On my PlaceMakers business card, my job title is “Storyteller.” I figured a graduate degree in English and a two-decade career in journalism gave me a certain amount of credibility in that department. What I didn’t count on, however, was what the title seemed to imply to most folks. To them, I was the spin doctor.

“We’ve got some great ideas, a really cool project,” potential clients might say. “But people just don’t get it. Time to educate them. Win ‘em over. Go work your magic so we can get back on track.”

Was I wrong to be reminded of the lopsided negotiation in Cool Hand Luke?

When there’s a disconnect between what somebody (a developer, a municipality, a non-profit) wants to do and what citizens or customers expect, there’s a tendency to blame the message. A communication breakdown.

Mostly, I find, the message is coming through loud and clear. To citizens, it sounds like: “Another meeting for another process that will deliver another round of nothing.”

How do we fix that perception?

Start with the reality.

And it helps to understand how stories work.

Storytelling Basics

All stories are purposeful. They’re meant to entertain or inform or inspire to action. Great ones might weave all three intentions. But most emphasize techniques designed to evoke one audience response over others.

Stories require the consent, if not the active participation, of an audience. People have to see themselves in the setting or identify with key characters or imagine themselves caught up in the action.

For that to happen, even in the most fantastic of story settings, there have to be handles for audiences to grab onto. The weirdest creatures need familiar human-like quirks. The wildest action needs just enough plausibility to permit suspension of disbelief. Our pattern-seeking brains will do a lot of the heavy lifting. But for the software to kick in, a threshold of coherence has to be crossed.

In stories meant to entertain or inform, it’s not crucial that all readers or audience members have the same experience. The bargain they make with storytellers doesn’t require them to do anything differently than they would otherwise do once they close a book or leave a theater. Once they’ve paid the price of admission, given their full consent, they’re likely to play along even if the story doesn’t always make sense. Unexpected plot twists are okay, even fun. And it’s not crucial if there’s disagreement on what the story ultimately means. In fact, discussing different takeaways with friends might even enhance appreciation of the whole experience.

Not so with the stories we tell to inspire and reward collaboration or to encourage next steps in a community development process. Even if they come to the story from different perspectives, audiences need to find their places quickly, to see themselves as characters benefitting from the direction the story takes towards a future we encourage them to expect.

Their heads have to nod: Yep, we see where this is going. Makes sense. Let’s go.

Getting to that kind of buy-in is especially tough these days. It’s not unusual for citizens to come to the story we’re hoping to tell with counter-stories of cynicism and suspicion. Which delays and perhaps even undermines the process the story is meant to support. Which, in turn, validates and escalates the cynicism.

How to avoid that spin cycle? Get it to move in the opposite direction.

The biggest little thing

The first rule of storytelling is: Know thy audience. Which is really an admonition to pay attention to the full context in which a story is to be told.

A community that has struggled to identify and assert shared values and hopes for the future isn’t likely to provide a great context for storytelling, especially when it comes to big, ambitious ideas. Chances are, people with their own stories of disappointment and frustration, buttressed by the experience of past efforts, will have a hard time imagining their roles in a new story or see the ambitions it describes as realistic.

Maybe, then, it’s time to unblock imaginations with smaller, less ambitious stories that change the context. That provide a better, more believable foundation for narratives of success.

We talked before about the essential task of building trust by, first, paying attention to what your citizens and customers value, then aligning strategies and performance to demonstrate you were listening. Here, for instance, from a 2015 post:

In public engagement contexts increasingly complicated by conflicting tribal perspectives, the story you want to tell is the story listeners are prepared to believe. And that requires listening for unifying touchstones that may force you to alter not only the way you tell your story but also the way you do business.

The way you do business requires defanging memories of projects and processes that didn’t align with reality. Start making a different reality. Replace the old stories with ones anchored in experiences of successes that are replicable and scaleable.

Forget the big, hairy ideas for the time being. Pick the biggest little thing you know you can do. Do it. Celebrate that success. Then, move to the next biggest, doable challenge. Repeat until your story of competence and performance is so duh-level believable that a happily ever after ending seems plausible for the big, hairy idea you want to propose.

The strategy, we argued before, is “to begin at the end, to start with delivering a better place, both literally and figuratively. And to do it now.”

If we skip right to the part where we create real examples of places and programs that perform as promised, (that demonstrate) even a small victory from even the most tentative collaboration, we can reverse engineer the tools and strategies that allow that to happen. And we can keep doing it till we reclaim trust in processes that connect what we want to do with what we actually do.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/17/plotting-a-persuasive-story-better-have-a-happily-ever-after/feed/0Civic Space: Creating Communityhttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/11/civic-space-creating-community/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=civic-space-creating-community
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/11/civic-space-creating-community/#commentsWed, 11 Oct 2017 04:37:54 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=17847Public space, or as many urbanists refer to it, civic space, sets the stage for community building. The study of how we use public space has been refined by Jan Gehl over the last thirty years, since the publication of his Life Between Buildings in 1987. A couple of weeks ago, Gehl released his Public Life Data Protocol, in an attempt to establish a standard method for the global collection of data on how we inhabit our civic spaces. And help the rest of us become better urban observers.

We’ve blogged extensively here about what it takes to make a great plaza. Scott Doyon wrote recently about attachment to place, and its power in strengthening neighborhoods. Today, I’m thinking more of a simple anecdote about a public place that moved me.

In September, I had the privilege of seeing how civic space can create the stage for place attachment and a sense of connection between neighbors. The CNU Board met in Savannah to plan for the Congress that will be there next May. The Downtown Alderman, Bill Durrence, hosted us at his townhouse on Washington Square one evening.

To set the context, Washington Square is in the NE corner of the Historic District. It is two blocks south of Bay Street, two blocks north of Broughton Street, at the eastern edge of Downtown. It is a quiet neighborhood square with minimal tourist traffic, even though it’s adjacent to the Brice Hotel. I wrote about the Oglethorpe Plan of Savannah a few months ago, and the squares being the organizing element of the plan’s fabric. Of all the squares, this one may be the hidden jewel, with the unrecognized value being the neighbors.

In September, a few of us arrived early and seeing a group gathering in Washington Square, we assumed that might be the reception. We introduced ourselves and discovered it was a group of neighbors that met there every Friday evening for drinks and conversation. They told us stories of the evolution of the practice and how the participation varies from week to week. Strangers are welcome. The group has a close relationship with the Brice Hotel and Pacci, the restaurant on the corner. I asked if they thought the square played a role in the connections of the group, and the answer was a clear affirmative. One gentlemen discussed the difference in the inclusion possible between a front porch and a square. With a porch, you can get to know your neighbors, but the size is limited and your presence is by invitation only. In a square, you get to know your neighbors as a group, and even random strangers like our little band of CNU folks are welcome. The extensive group of dogs also would not be possible in a more confined environment.

Physically, Washington Square isn’t exceptional. There is no monument to a historic figure, no piece of public art, and no famous person’s house. (Visit-Historic-Savannah.com, 2017) But it has all the critical pieces for neighborhood placemaking. There is ample shade. The sidewalks provide direct routes from adjacent streets. There are benches for resting, reading, and enjoying a beverage. The adjacent houses are well-proportioned and attractive, with engaging frontages. It isn’t dramatic or breathtaking, but is exactly the sort of stage upon which neighbors can build relationships.

We were there when Irma was making her way north, and Savannah had a mandatory evacuation looming the next day. This likely made the power of the place even more notable. A colleague and co-chair of the CNU Local Host Committee, Kevin Klinkenberg, recently wrote about the experience of the city under evacuation, and the special bond that is created between residents in an emergency. That Friday evening, Irma was central to the conversation. Neighbors were discussing who was staying and who was leaving, volunteering to watch after each other’s homes, asking about people they hadn’t seen lately, and reminiscing about the Matthew cleanup last year. They told stories about spontaneously showing up in the square to gather debris and cut broken branches. They told about the Pacci owner sending over a keg of beer as his contribution. In fact, that evening, Pacci was providing free drinks to the neighbors in preparation for Irma. This is a powerful example of the place attachment Scott discussed.

While this post is a simple story about the social value of civic space, the Future of Places Research Network is currently compiling a database of the many factors that are connected through civic space.

… public space is a broad inter-disciplinary topic, and most investigations have focused on some narrower aspect of public space – for example, the economic exchanges that happen there, or the different ethnic groups that are present, or other topics from economics, anthropology, public health, or other fields.
But precisely because public space is a cross-cutting disciplinary subject, it has the capacity to provide a lens on how many of these other issues are connected.

I mentioned the fiscal challenges to maintaining public space in the prior Savannah post, and while the initial capital investment, along with the long term maintenance, may seem daunting, there is substantial data showing the significant return on the investment. It often seems that we can’t justify an investment in public good without a positive fiscal return. Fortunately, studies show the return on investment in civic spaces includes public health, market value of both residential and commercial properties, and environmental benefits. (Lee, A.C.K., Jordan, H.C., & Horsley, J., 2015)

As city park budgets are stretched, it is easy to prioritize large structured recreation facilities rather than the small urban spaces. However, from the vantage point of equity, health, and place attachment, the small spaces have significant return. James Oglethorpe understood the power of the neighborhood space, and the Congress next year has many urbanists eager to learn from Savannah. In the mean time, check out the #FBCIForum this week for tips on how to lower the barriers to human-scaled public space and #PlacemakingWeek for inspiration from Amsterdam.

Back to Washington Square in Savannah, what moves me about this public space is its ability to convene community. The square provides an accessible place of solace and celebration. In the end, as I’ve said before, it’s not about the buildings, or even the streets. It’s about the experience.

All photos are CreativeCommons ShareAlike License with Attribution to Susan Henderson at placemakers.com, unless otherwise noted. Click any image for a larger view.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/11/civic-space-creating-community/feed/0CNU Climate Summit Highlightshttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/03/cnu-climate-summit-highlights/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cnu-climate-summit-highlights
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/03/cnu-climate-summit-highlights/#commentsTue, 03 Oct 2017 19:20:41 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=17777A group of concerned urban designers, architects, ecologists, and economists gathered last week in Alexandria, Virginia, to discuss resilience at the CNU Climate Summit. Unable to join, I reached a few participants by phone and followed the Twitter hashtag, #CNUClimate, to hear highlights of the presentations and working groups. Several of their ideas resonate with the resilience thread here, and is another step in the process of answering some of the questions we often pose. Warning, this blog is long and heavy on direct quotes.

The central idea of the gathering, in the words of Shelly Poticha: “Urbanists need a lot more friends to make an impact. More cross-sector collaboration is key to climate resilience.” Susan Henderson agrees, “The Summit was an intense conversation between groups that usually work independently. One outcome is a wiki of resources that spans many organizations and tools, where we can organically learn from one another, post the value of an improved physical environment, and provide the narrative for change.”

Marina Khoury finds encouragement from the group’s track record, saying, “CNU is well-positioned to assist in the climate mitigation and adaptation effort, as we have successfully reformed systems and changed the national dialogue on complex cultural issues, like car-centric versus walkable development. Climate resilience is a greater task of overwhelming complexity. How do cities learn? Know what we know – and know what we do not. Then nimbly apply proven solutions to other places, as well as develop homegrown interventions.”

The Context

“In 65 years, there have been 3,443 federally-declared disasters. In the 12 years since Hurricane Katrina, there have been 1,482 federally-declared disasters. That’s an increase of over one per week between those two periods,” per disaster recovery worker and FEMA policy expert, Laura Clemons. “Harvey impacted 229 cities and counties – most you’ve never heard of – 80% of which were under 20,000 people. Because of funding structures, if you cannot get to a community in the first three weeks, you lose the chance to build back better.”

“Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria will cost the US government $280 billion, at last estimate. The intensity of these three storms in three weeks has never happened in U.S. history,” Steve Mouzon relays. “During the last superstorm year of 2005, we suffered through Katrina, Rita, Wilma. That year, we ran out of letters to name storms and the Great Recession of 2008 soon followed.”

“Now, we are experiencing again a challenging time for the U.S. economy. We have to have models that are financially self-perpetuating to get locals to harden their assets, in terms of savings on insurance and federal support over time,” Mouzon warns. “We cannot expect to be rescued every time. It’s a bootstrap thing. We have to quickly evolve into the mental toughness of our grandparents. What we can do, as urbanists, to adapt to the new realities that are coming our way?”

Trees on King Street in Alexandria add significant value to people, planet, and profit. Image: CreativeCommons ShareAlike License with Attribution to Susan Henderson at placemakers.com.

What’s Your Story?

To say our political context is fractured is putting it gently. Stories are essential to finding common ground. When the story is about the economic and social benefits of livable places, the political divide fades somewhat.

“Maybe your story is just about a tree,” says Steve Mouzon. “Each street tree my city plants on my block makes my home value go up by about $2,000, by the time it matures. Each street tree we plant on our lot makes our home value increase by about $10,000, once it’s grown. While this value capture may be the reason that I plant trees, the act significantly helps reduce the urban heat island and greenhouse gasses. A significant portion of the population denies climate change, but most care about the first part of this particular story, if not the second.”

Tell the story that moves the community toward common ground. One story isn’t enough. Every angle is needed. “Physical, social, infrastructural, and economic resilience are all necessary. For much of resilience, there is no data sets telling us what people value,” per Dr. Janice Barnes, the Global Resilience Director for Perkins+Will.

“How we frame the problem is as key as how we begin to solve it,” cautions Marina Khoury. “Most cities do not know how to solve the magnitude of climate resiliency issues. We have time-tested, innovative solutions that can drive down carbon emissions and provide a better quality of life. Our public engagement forums greatly assist us in gleaning from people what they care about and help illustrate trade-offs and scenarios tied to the core values of citizens.”

The Citizens Climate Lobby talk by Jay Butera eloquently spoke of giving people hope (tied to how we message), solutions (simple and relatable), and citizen advocacy (energizing with results, empowering collaboration, and understanding individual contributions).

King Street in Alexandria is the sort of walkable urban place that the tools below seek to incentivize. Image: CreativeCommons ShareAlike License with Attribution to Susan Henderson at placemakers.com.

Measuring Tools

“Land use is not a big consideration in today’s climate action plans (CAPs) being adopted by cities. Affordable transportation is not prioritized,” per Jen McGraw of Center for Neighborhood Technology. Not unsurprisingly, she says, “The counting counts. Most CAPs are performance based, so we have to get better at measuring the particulars of the places that people love, which are usually the places that perform. If great New Urbanist plans are not keeping score of climate impacts, they generally don’t count toward the plan. About 82 million households (out of about 117 million) in the U.S. live in low densities of about 3 households per acre. We have to move that needle to make a difference.”

Change happens at the speed of decision making. Better tools allow for better decisions and better places. Climate change, tragically, is not a high priority to most people. We can’t sell climate change if all we talk about is climate change. It doesn’t trump all issues to everyone.

“My passion for last 15 years is to get a wake-up tool in everyone’s hands, and bust a lot of silos,” says Peter Calthorpe. “All areas of government intersect in urban planning. Cities are not a collection of silos! Central to all climate change impacts (transportation, energy, land use) is urban form.”

Reduces land lost to development by about the size of Delaware plus Rhode Island

While SB 375 is all about reducing carbon, the side effects include creating community, thanks to visionary California urbanists. That’s because California’s SB 375 pays attention to land use and transportation patterns.

“We need to get past the slogans, and down to the numbers that matter,” Peter Calthorpe encourages us. “States and cities are the solution to mitigation rather than the gridlock of the federal government. We can’t win the debate by talking about climate change. Urban form has the greatest impact on mitigation.” Watch Peter’s full lecture here.

Every project should begin with clear questions. Dr. Janice Barnes suggests these: “What are climate projections on your site? What are vulnerabilities as a result? How does your design address the gap?” Lynn Englum adds, “How do you turn vulnerability into hotbeds of design?”

A growing set of tools measures the impact of urban form on climate. Here is a selection, but more are welcome in the comments section at the end of this blog. Watch for a collaborative wiki from CNU.org soon.

ALLTransit: CNT’s new national database counts the benefits of transit systems

It is essential that climate adaptation be for everyone, and not just benefit the wealthy. Dr. Janice Barnes says, “Resilient design can shift the conversation from building a landfill to reducing poverty. We want to have design in everything we do and resilience in all our design. We need a Climate Action Plan (CAP) for each city. We need to listen and learn how a community can best build resilience into their fabric over time. Match deliverables with local government’s internal language. Architects are trained to play lead guitar, but in resilience work, we need to know how to play rhythm guitar. The speed of trust is essential to effective recovery work.”

“For decades, the United Nations saw slums as something to be eradicated. Now, they see them as places to be made healthier. Most slums are very productive; everyone works. They are very aspirational and over 1 billion people live there,” via Doug Kelbaugh.

Even outside of slums, lower-income populations tend to live nearer high auto emissions like near freeways and in low-lying areas. People are unaware how much location impacts health. Rebuild by Design says, “Design must be interdisciplinary, regional, replicable, implementable, inclusive, and collaborative. Build forward, do not ‘build back.’ What should the future look like?”

USGBC wants the future to look “safe, healthy, inclusive, smart, productive, efficient, equitable, sustainable, responsive, and resilient.” Elizabeth Beardsley says, “At USGBC, we want green buildings to simply be the normal way of building, not something special. We see our role at as activating people to act and to advocate for building more sustainably.”

Resiliency: The Need for Lean Regulations

There is so much we can learn by the developing world and the savviness of the people there. Dr. Janice Barnes shares stories of Southeast Asia and encourages us to, “Stop looking at the developed world as a paradigm.”

Wet flood-proofing is not currently recognized by FEMA, but Ryan Jacobson from NYC Department of City Planning says it should be. “Shared walls, cellar spaces, and building access are all adaptation challenges on Main Street. Inviting access to customers is a problem when a shop is raised but street is not. Healthy retail corridors are not supported by existing flood plain regulations. Tenants on ground level have greatest incentive to elevate building; those on upper levels, not so much. In New York, cellar spaces are prevalent because it’s ‘free space’ that doesn’t count against FAR. In the end, ground resiliency efforts must pair design solutions with policy solutions.”

As adaptation becomes a reality, every community has to answer the hard question, “What do we do now?” Steve Mouzon, a Miami Beach resident and architect says, “Some places will have enough land value to elevate and harden, with their own dollars. Those are voices from the front lines of adaptation. The City of Miami Beach is already raising the streets, but not yet raising the buildings, so they are already flooding. Cities should not expect anyone from outside the city limit sign to give them any money.”

The few cities in the U.S. that have elevated buildings include Galveston, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, adding 17 to 26 feet of elevation of masonry buildings. Chicago did it to a drum beat. There are models for how this can work. However, we also need affordable solutions. Not everyone can lift a house.

“We must get comfortable with change,” Marina Khoury encourages us. “No one thing ever does it. We need constant change over time, much like the growth of cities, but at the local, regional and national levels. Subsidiarity must ensure that decisions can be made at the lowest competent level. The greatest changes will likely need to happen at the local level and forging as many partnerships as possible. We disagree on the role the feds can play, with some thinking we must rely less on the feds and empower regional partners, while others are optimistic that the feds must be part of the solution. A set of climate resiliency toolkits, organized around the four levels of planning, can begin to frame the solutions. We need to get stronger at taking ownership of and highlighting every success story.”

Every small win matters. Every new solution set must be freely shared.

Thank You!

Thanks to these climate changer Tweeps for sharing ideas and supplying much of the content of this blog via #CNUClimate:

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.

]]>http://www.placemakers.com/2017/10/03/cnu-climate-summit-highlights/feed/0Place Attachment as a Tool for Shaping Changehttp://www.placemakers.com/2017/09/27/place-attachment-as-a-tool-for-shaping-change/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=place-attachment-as-a-tool-for-shaping-change
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/09/27/place-attachment-as-a-tool-for-shaping-change/#commentsWed, 27 Sep 2017 16:21:28 +0000PlaceMakershttp://www.placemakers.com/?p=17766Gentrification gets a lot of attention these days, and rightfully so. Particularly as it relates to issues of displacement. No one (or at least no one of heart) wants to see anyone forced from their home and from the community they care for and that, oftentimes, cares for them.

The dangled carrot of economic opportunity, coupled with the municipal policies and regulations that shape how it gets consumed, makes for an awfully blunt tool. When applied to more disadvantaged or powerless communities, as it often is, it’s seemingly heartless as well.

That’s no kind of way to build a better places to live.

But there’s another angle as well that gets decidedly less attention: The far more prevalent places — places of pervasive disinvestment and poverty — that aren’t experiencing gentrification. Or anything else. Places defined only by their slow, agonizing decline and ongoing loss of investment and possibility.

Consigning anyone to the prospect of a neighborhood falling down around them, with little opportunity to get by, much less advance and build wealth, is also no kind of way to build a better place to live.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But not always. Some places have more successfully navigated these waters than others which invites the question: What is the magic ingredient in either of the above scenarios — facing gentrification or suffering decline — that makes better outcomes possible? That gives greater voice and power to affected communities?

The answer, I’ve come to believe, is attachment. To each other and to the place held in common. We fight for what we love. When we’re connected in shared affection, we’re both more inclined and more empowered to organize, which allows us to fight harder. That can add up. Not just to a meaningful voice for change but to a legitimate seat at the table.

So what makes for attachment?

Getting at the soul

The Soul of the Community was a roughly three year effort by the Knight Foundation between 2008 and 2010 that “focused on the emotional side of the connection between residents and their communities, examining factors correlated with loyalty to and passionate feelings about place.”

Its findings were extensive (explore the report here) but a few items were of particular note. First, it was found (again and again) that the three things most correlated with attachment and commitment to place are things to do, attractive surroundings in which to do them, and an inclusive spirit ensuring all are welcome. Not the usual metrics — like schools, police, and cost of living — commonly cited in purchase decisions.

Second, it was found that higher levels of attachment translate to higher levels of getting things done, particularly as it relates to local economic opportunity and benefit. That is, when we love our place we’re more passionate about it and that passion fuels the kinds of activities that incrementally pay off.

Photo credit: Street Art NYC.

What’s the lesson?

For communities facing either of the above scenarios, the Soul of the Community’s findings suggest that little things like block parties or setting up a garden or painting a mural, and doing those things in an open and welcoming way, may ultimately pay greater dividends in terms of political currency over time than a few community stalwarts hammering away at city hall for things like better schools, more police on the beat, or more affordable housing.

In short, achieving a stronger sense of place attachment begets a more connected, engaged, organized, and collectively passionate community, which may ultimately be the more effective route to bigger, more tangible ambitions — crime reduction, education and, yes, helping to shape development forces in favor of neighborhood interests.

Place attachment offers the promise of more effectively empowering the powerless — amplifying its voice through deeper connection and shared commitment. That builds a stronger, more unified, more focused constituency which, it would seem, may be the most critical community resource of all.

If PlaceShakers is our soapbox, our Facebook page is where we step down, grab a drink and enjoy a little conversation. Looking for a heads-up on the latest community-building news and perspective from around the web? Click through and “Like” us and we’ll keep you in the loop.